Product Development Collaboration

Involving customers in the development process is no longer an optional strategy. In fact, in a February 2014 presentation, Herman Wories made a statement about the role of innovation: “Innovation is no longer a competitive advantage: it’s a competitive necessity. In order to keep up, you need to continuously innovate.” So customers (and employees of innovative companies) have come to expect that their opinions and feedback will play a role in the future of a product or service that they enjoy. IdeaScale is a collaboration tool that will aid in the product development collaboration process.

How Product Development Collaboration Works:

Some IdeaScale clients collaborate with their employees and others collaborate with their customers – some collaborate with valuable stakeholders and other with vast groups of constituents. By asking for ideas, feedback, inspiration, and suggestions, product development collaboration teams gather an actionable array of product data that they use to create a product roadmap. That data is then organized by content type with tags or campaigns; organized by popularity with meta-data like comments or votes; and organized by expert opinions with the refinement and assessment stages. After that it’s up to the product development team to make those ideas a reality. With IdeaScale’s functionality that allows for the crowd to participate in each of these stages, collaboration is truly possible throughout the innovation lifecycle.

The additional benefit of collaboration with the crowd is that, it ultimately lowers the cost of research and development, because the potential resources of any organization multiply exponentially. Because everyone is responsible for quality product development, the team helps to remain vigilant for improvements and evangelizes those improvements upon any product’s release. As time goes on, whole crowds become product experts.

Find out what features or improvements your network would like to see and let their voting prioritize the features as they will be developed by the team.

Your next new product inspiration comes from your customers.

Connect to your customers and employees and identify the new great idea for your business.